NASA’s Juno mission scientists have used complex data collected during two flybys of Jupiter’s third largest moon Io to create animations that highlight this moon’s most dramatic features. Io is a little bit larger than the planet Earth and is also home to a mountain with a smooth lake of lava. Lava lakes like Io’s Loki Patera have a cooling surface crust that slowly thickens until it becomes denser than the underlying magma. It then sinks and pulls in the nearby crust.
First launched in 2011, Juno arrived at our solar system’s largest planet in 2016 with a mission to explore the Jovian system. It has 95 known moons and its four largest–Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto–are called the Galilean moons. Io is most volcanically active.
This animation is an artist’s concept of Loki Patera, a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io, made using data from the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. With multiple islands in its interior, Loki is a depression filled with magma and rimmed with molten lava. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS.
“Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action,” Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton said in a statement. “We also got some great close-ups and other data on a 200-kilometer-long [127-mile-long] lava lake called Loki Patera. There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava. The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”
The observations were announced April 16 during the European Geophysical Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria.
[Related: See the most volcanic world in our solar system in new NASA images.]
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